1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an autonomous mobile device having its movement controlled by a control device, and a control device and a program product for the autonomous mobile device.
2. Background Art
Recently, various robots which share an activity space with human beings have been announced. Examples of the robots include autonomous mobile robots for hospital use and domestic use such as cleaning robots for cleaning floors instead of persons and nursing-care robots for transferring a person who hardly can move by himself or a person in bed. In the recent aging society, such robots for reducing burdens of persons and supporting persons come to be material in the society. Since robots which coexist with persons should be safe for persons, such a collision avoidance technique has been presented that collision with a moving person is avoidable (for example, see Non-patent Document 1).    [Non-patent Document] Takashi TSUBOUCHI, Tomohide NANIWA, Suguru ARIMOTO “PLANNING AND NAVIGATION BY A MOBILE ROBOT IN THE PRESENCE OF MULTIPLE MOVING OBSTACLES AND THEIR VELOCITIES” Japan Robot Journal, Vol. 12, No. 7, pp. 1029-1037, 1994
In the conventional collision avoidance technique, a transfer pathway and a transfer velocity were predicted linearly based on a velocity vector of a moving person, and a robot avoids the transfer pathway to avoid a collision with the moving person. However, it was hard to predict a movement of a person, and thus the robot could take an evasive action in a direction the person moved due to an unforeseeable movement of a person. As such, it has been difficult to have the robot take a safe, easy, and smooth evasive action.